In museums, and exhibition sites in general, it is through human remains that the question of human dignity is most often posed. The line between body-person and body-object\u200a\u2014\u200aproblematic when one is dealing with a dead body\u200a\u2014\u200aseems to be resolved when the human being is alive. In Western countries, humans cannot be exhibited as living beings. The law sets out the sovereign principle of unavailability of the human body, which cannot, as such, be the object of a contract. In the West, the human is considered res extra commercium<\/em>\u200a\u2014\u200aliterally, \u201ca thing outside commerce.\u201d When humans appear in an exhibition, they generally do so as performers, playing roles integrated into a symbolic discourse. In some practices, however, such as those of Brett Bailey and Santiago Sierra, the line between the symbolic order and the real is more ambiguous. Bailey, a white South African artist, uses the model of the human zoo from colonial fairs of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to re-create contemporary tableaux vivants, or \u201chuman installations,\u201d in which black people take poses that reproduce episodes in the history of racism. Spanish artist Sierra seeks to show how capitalism reinforces situations of domination and submission by paying anyone in economic difficulty who is willing to earn a few dollars for performing degrading actions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In The Exhibit Series<\/em> (2010\u200a\u2013\u200a15), Bailey proposes that visitors confront scenes of colonial history, from the Hottentot Venus to contemporary migrants; he also includes incidents more specific to Africa, such as the castration of a Kenyan man during the Mau Mau Uprising and the presentation of Dr. Fischer\u2019s cabinet of curiosities, which displayed decapitated human heads from Namibia. Bailey\u2019s reconstructed scenes thus show, among other things, men and women bound to airplane seats with their mouths gagged, feet bound together, and hands shackled, and a woman sitting on a chair behind chain-link fencing, with a sign saying \u201cThe blacks have been fed.\u201d Bailey builds a scenario for each tableau vivant, sometimes by doing research on little-known historical events, many of which are linked to the country in which he produces his pieces. Visitors are asked to move from cubicle to cubicle individually; each must confront the scenes alone. Bailey asks the performers to follow the visitors with their eyes in order to engage with them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n How Bailey\u2019s installations are received varies widely, depending on where they are exhibited. Some feel that they provide a needed opportunity to understand the persistence of racism and the manufacturing of xenophobia\u200a\u2014\u200ain fact, the artist\u2019s work is supported by numerous anti-racist organizations, including the International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism, the Movement against Racism and for Friendship between Peoples, and the Human Rights League\u200a\u2014\u200awhereas others see them as racist. Although the installation Exhibit B<\/em> did not provoke protests at the Festival d\u2019Avignon, its presentation at the Th\u00e9\u00e2tre G\u00e9rard Philipe in Saint-Denis in 2014 was the subject of a petition with a long list of signatures; the petition demanded that the exhibition be cancelled because it \u201cfeatured blacks chained and in different degrading positions\u201d\u20093<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - \u201cD\u00e9programmer le zoo humain!,\u201d citizens\u2019 petition addressed to the directors of the Centre Centquatre and the Th\u00e9\u00e2tre G\u00e9rard Philipe, as well as to the mayors of Paris and Saint-Denis (our translation).<\/span> and was racist. A number of reasons were given for this opposition: Bailey is white and grew up under apartheid; his tableaux vivants are violations of human dignity; in reusing the contrivance of the human zoo, he neglects to put the white oppressor on display. Other accusations arise from the artist\u2019s likening of the migrants shown in his tableaux to subjects of colonial exploitation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The debate originated in an article published in The Guardian<\/em> revisiting the impunity of art and the need for censorship, in which the author claimed, \u201cExhibit B<\/em> is offensive because it perpetuates the objectification of the black body that is a standard trope of society.\u201d\u20094<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Kehinde Andrews, \u201cExhibit B, the human zoo is a grotesque parody\u200a\u2014\u200aboycott it,\u201d The Guardian<\/em>, September 12, 2014, accessed March 19, 2016, http:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/commentisfree\/2014\/sep\/12\/exhibit-b-human-zoo-boycott-exhibition-racial-abuse.<\/span> Yet, the actors in Bailey\u2019s Exhibit Series<\/em> recount that their tangible experience of the visitors\u2019 sudden realization encouraged them to continue with what they were doing: \u201cOn arrival, at the first tableau, most people don\u2019t even recognize that humans are standing there. For a moment, especially for the first few, we are objects. Then, our eyes meet. In that moment when our eyes meet, we cease to be objectified and become human\u2026. Some break into tears; others immediately look away.\u201d\u20095<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - \u201cExhibit B: is the \u2018human zoo\u2019 racist? The performers respond,\u201d The Guardian, <\/em>September 5, 2014, accessed March 19, 2016, http:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/culture\/2014\/sep\/05\/exhibit-b-is-the-human-zoo-racist-the-performers-respond.<\/span> Objectification is thus part of the mise en sc\u00e8ne<\/em>. Regarding the interplay of gazes, sociologist \u00c9ric Fassin notes, in defence of Bailey, that \u201cwith this device, we are not at the zoo; we are in <\/em>the \u2018human zoo.\u2019\u201d\u20096<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - \u00c9ric Fassin, \u201cLa race, \u00e7a nous regarde,\u201d Lib\u00e9ration<\/em>, July 25, 2013, accessed March 15, 2016, http:\/\/next.liberation.fr\/culture\/2013\/07\/25\/la-race-ca-nous-regarde_920834 (our translation).<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n One of the arguments invoked for banning the performative installations was that it is not legitimate for a white person born under apartheid to speak about racism. Taken to the extreme, this argument would mean that only black people can speak of racism and that all white people who lived under apartheid are racists. One may thus wonder why an American film in which black actors play slaves is not, by extension, a racist film, or why films made by Gavin Hood (Tsotsi<\/em>) and Darrell Roodt (Yesterday<\/em>)\u200a\u2014\u200awhite South African directors who also grew up under apartheid\u200a\u2014\u200acan feature black people who suffered through segregationism or its effects and not be deemed racist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The performances in Bailey\u2019s installations do not seem to produce the same impact. That the visitor is dealing with a living being probably has much to do with the perception of the project as reactivating racial theories. The effect of the real confronts that of the symbolic. The performers are playing roles, but the fact that they may suffer racism as black people\u200a\u2014\u200ain real life\u200a\u2014\u200ahelps to blur the lines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In other cases, the human beings exhibited are clearly not considered characters. They are not playing a role; their place in the exhibition is linked solely to the fact that they are alive. In the late 2000s, artist Gregor Schneider planned to find a volunteer who would agree to live out his life in a museum or gallery in order to criticize the quality of palliative care in Germany. This idea of exhibiting a man who \u201cdies a natural death or who recently died a natural death\u201d was not brought to fruition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In a different vein, for his works Sierra recruits drug addicts, illegal immigrants, and extremely poor people ready to do anything for a few dollars. For example, he tattooed a line on the backs of several people (Line of<\/em> 30 cm Tattooed on a Remunerated Person<\/em>, Regina Street 51, Mexico City, May 1998<\/em>), made hope chests in which individuals were secretly enclosed during a vernissage, paid people to sit in boxes for the duration of an exhibition (Workers paid to remain inside cardboard boxes,<\/em> ACE Gallery New York, March 2000), asked others to stand facing a wall for many hours, and so on. One could, of course, argue that these people have the right to do what they want with their bodies and that they gave their consent. However, even if his intention is to denounce the domination and exploitation of the poorest and he claims that he is doing no more than the capitalist world already does, Sierra is using means resembling those employed by slave traders in their treatment of slaves, including confinement in small spaces, marking of bodies, and shackling. Although these mechanisms are inherent to Bailey\u2019s representation of human zoos, we may wonder what they convey for Sierra, who, in the end, becomes an exploiter like any other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Generally, ethics or moral values are transgressed in art in order to denounce something\u200a\u2014\u200afor example, racism (Bailey), the miseries induced by capitalism (Sierra), or the quality of palliative care in Germany (Schneider). In the view of these artists, the scandal is not in what they are showing, but in the real world. This is why they do not hesitate to blur the lines between the real and the symbolic. Freedom of expression reaches a limit, however, when one enters the domain of the live, which cannot be disentangled from the real and, as such, is opposed to the order of the symbolic that generally justifies the impunity of art. We must therefore differentiate exhibitions in which humans play a role from the more problematic projects in which they are barely considered as people. Although the human zoos of colonial exhibitions, in which humans were bestialized, have not existed since the 1930s, we may observe that the principle under which they operated has not totally disappeared from contemporary exhibitions and that it sometimes activates other forms of racism, such as social racism. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Translated from the French by K\u00e4the Roth<\/strong><\/p>\n![\"87_DO07_Desmet_Sierra_30cm-Line\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/87_DO07_Desmet_Sierra_30cm-Line-scaled.jpg\")
Line of 30 cm Tattooed on a Remunerated Person<\/em>, 1998.
\u00a9 Santiago Sierra \/ SODRAC (2016)
Photo : courtesy of the artist and Prometeo Gallery<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"EXHIBIT](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/87_DO07_Desmet_Bailey_Civilizing-the-Natives-scaled.jpg\")
Civilizing the Natives \u2014 Herero woman forced to clean skulls of deceased prisoner in German South West African concentration camps<\/em>, 2014.
Photo : \u00a9 Victor Tonelli<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"87_DO07_Desmet_Bailey_Dr](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/87_DO07_Desmet_Bailey_Dr-Fischers-Cabinet-of-Curiosities.jpg\")
Dr Fischer\u2019s Cabinet of Curiosities \u2014 choir of singers from Namibia singing lamentations in remembrance of prisoners decapitated in German South West African concentration camps<\/em>, 2014.
Photo : \u00a9 Ada Nieuwendijk<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Bailey_Survival-of-the-Fittest\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/87_DO07_Desmet_Bailey_Survival-of-the-Fittest-scaled.jpg\")
Survival of the Fittest \u2014 Mariame Getu Hagos, killed on a deportation flight from Paris, 2003<\/em>, 2014.
Photo : \u00a9 Victor Tonelli<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"87_DO07_Desmet_Bailey_Found](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/87_DO07_Desmet_Bailey_Found-Objects.jpg\")
Found Objects \u2014 asylum seekers in Amsterdam<\/em>, 2014.
Photo : \u00a9 Ada Nieuwendijk<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"87_DO07_Desmet_Bailey_The](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/87_DO07_Desmet_Bailey_The-Age-of-Enlightenment-scaled.jpg\")
<\/strong>The Age of Enlightenment \u2014 Angelo Soliman, historian and philosopher, stuffed and exhibited in Viennese natural history museum, late 18th<\/sup> century<\/em>, 2014.
Photo : \u00a9 Sofie Knijff<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"87_DO07_Desmet_Sierra_12](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/87_DO07_Desmet_Sierra_12-Remunerated-Workers-scaled.jpg\")
12 Remunerated Workers<\/em>, 2000.
\u00a9 Santiago Sierra \/ SODRAC (2016)
Photo : courtesy of Ace Gallery<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n